Case file · Non-fiction & research literature
Kazantsev's 'Explosion': Tunguska as a crashed spaceship
Science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev's story 'Explosion' proposed that Tunguska was the nuclear blast of a Martian spaceship, an idea later repeated as fact.
1946 CE · 60.87, 101.93 · status: claim
The account
Written after Hiroshima, the story compared the standing trees at the epicentre with those under the atomic blast. Kazantsev went on to promote ancient-astronaut ideas for decades, and the 'alien ship' became one of the most persistent Tunguska theories in Soviet popular culture.
The sceptical view
Soil and tree-ring studies found no radioactivity of the kind a nuclear explosion leaves; scientists treat the idea as fiction that escaped its genre.
Connections in the atlas
- Ogdy, the fire god, punishes the Evenki
- Tunguska event